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Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

investors.squarespace.com

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Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#281

Post by BytesAndGears »

CPLX wrote: post #70
berkeleyjunk wrote: post #2

It is interesting how most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I have tried to investigate why but could not find a good explanation to why this number is so prevalent.

Imagine ranking all the shareholders of the company. For each, you've asked them how much you'd have to give them to convince them to sell. At the top of the list would be the one who is the most interested in selling, and thus is willing to take the lowest price. At the bottom of the list would be the person who is the least interested in selling, and is demanding the highest price. In order to buy one share you ask…

Or at least, the 51st percentile…

But I think you’re spot-on. If someone owns the stock, usually it’s because they think the company is worth more in the future than it is currently.

And you need to convince the majority of the shareholders to sell it to you now.

So you need to take into account their expected future value on holding, and give them a reasonable risk-adjusted premium for that expected future value of their shares.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#282

Post by ethbr1 »

chii wrote: post #97
ethbr1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd make a joke about innovation, but not sure how innovative Square has been the last five years. Honestly, isn't that a great match for PE? Once a company has run its innovation sprint, convert it to keep-the-lights-on and cut costs. In return, PE gets to buy a revenue stream.

The unsaid thing is that the customer signed up to squarespace is going to get less value for their dollars. Profit has to come from somewhere, and it aint innovation as you said.

Flip side is that PE-owned companies probably run leaner than public, as they don't have to show growth.

We're all familiar with the gut-and-life-support PE examples.

But there are a lot of trim-the-fat PE examples too.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#283

Post by gruez »

toddmorey wrote: post #264

It’s like a huge if in statement: Forward-looking statements often contain words such as "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "aims," "plan," "believe," "could," "seek," "see," "will," "may," "would," "might," "considered," "potential," "estimate," "continue," "likely," "expect," "target"

That's boilerplate for basically anything that a public company sends out, otherwise they might get sued for securities fraud if their statements don't come to pass.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#284

Post by nytesky »

idontwantthis wrote: post #258
packetlost wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like making it easy to how your own website is something that can be solved with an ingress service (Tailscale funnel?) + DNS management and a small box that someone buys and leaves in their living room. It doesn't have to require any technical expertise, you just need to build a lot of things to make it that way.

I’ve thought about making my own homepage to replace my instagram/fb and share my life with my friends, but how would anyone find it? I guess I could email everyone and tell them. I’ve wondered if there is a way I could easily get that to the top of Google for my name, but there are a few famous people with my name.

You could get the URL out. I would like to have it require some authentication, and I don’t see too many easy ways to add authentication. I use Google Workspace for hosting and I guess it would default to Google IDs? Does SquareSpace provide access control for low cost accounts?

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#285

Post by JumpCrisscross »

CapcomGo wrote: post #244
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SquareSpace has ~44% of the self-hosted website market. Shouldn't that be enough? They’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit on hundreds of millions of dollars of gross profit [1]. Most of the cost is marketing & sales. Private equity is actually about focussing less on growth and more on sustainability; the logic of this acquisition is that 44% is enough. [1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CI…

Isn't PE really focused on getting their fees?

> Isn't PE really focused on getting their fees?

Sure? Most people are motivated by compensation.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#286

Post by gruez »

dewey wrote: post #263
avree wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems about right? I use Netlify to deploy my own 11ty static site, and it costs $19/month, plus there's no WYSIWYG editor like Squarespace.

What’s the reason for doing that? Can’t you host a static page for 5 dollars basically everywhere? Even on expensive AWS it’s 5 dollars: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

lightsail is basically the lowest tier of AWS offerings. It's designed to compete with providers like linode or digitalocean, not gcp or azure. Moreover, lightsail is IaaS - you get a vps that you have to set up and administer yourself. Squarespace/Netlify is PaaS or SaaS - all that is handled for you. Maybe you think all of that isn't too hard and isn't worth the $14 or whatever premium, but it's still comparing apples to oranges.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#287

Post by tomrod »

packetlost wrote: post #141
jpgvm wrote: post #39

This makes the Google registrar change even worse. I need to get my act together and transfer my .dev domain. :/

I moved my .dev domains under Porkbun right after it was announced that Google Domains was being sold to squarespace, so you don't have to drop the domains. Porkbun is also quite friendly IME.

I don't know porkbun. I was looking at namecheap -- why porkbun?

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#288

Post by matwood »

Dowwie wrote: post #150

In other words, it's a great time to build the next Squarespace.

When PE steps in, it usually means the growth is gone. They are often operators with teams who know how to run a lean business. If Squarespace had some huge growth estimates, PE would not have been able to afford to take them public.

So there may be an opportunity, but finding customers and funding will be hard.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#289

Post by Aaronstotle »

renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

Until Web 3.0 is disconnected from blockchains, I don't see this happening

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#290

Post by michaelt »

gravitronic wrote: post #198
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 3 years running mailinabox. Zero problems after first month of hiccups. Installed a second server last year. That had 0 problems since day 1. I feel like people overblow the whole email thing. Want you to pay for tuta et al when you can build your own and manage it. I havent updated both servers in a year. Zero problems. Again, people maybe confuse miab and other email servers maintenance with maintaining nextcl…

When you send a cold email (initiating a thread or first email to someone) does it land in the recipients inbox or spam? This was what eventually broke my self hosting plan.. too many emails sent and never received.

And the worst part is this stuff is damn near undetectable.

Maybe my buddy hasn't responded because he's got a lot going on at work at the moment. Or maybe my DKIM/DMARC records aren't playing well with his mail forwarder. Pretty difficult for me to tell - I'm not in the habit of phoning someone to tell them I sent them an e-mail.

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